Well, this was new.

Anapa just watched, at first. The shadowy peripherals of others’ vision was where he tended to gravitate in spaces which numbered more than two (including himself). He lingered there when Danny started and moved forward, speaking to the woman in a gentle, coaxing voice, as though she were a wounded animal. Perhaps she was. Anapa, who had about as much experience with the living as he had with computer programming, just watched silently from a distance. The woman’s bruises – or shadows, Danny had called them – seemed to shift over her body as she moved, her actions small and jerky, dark gold eyes wide and staring.

Danny dashed about her, responding to her needs with the empathy one would expect from someone at home in the land of the living. The gaunt-faced woman seemed to gain some strength from the water, eventually being able to hold the cup herself. She drank as though she’d just stepped from the desert. Anapa watched wordlessly as a glimmering trickle of water slid from her cracked lips down towards her chin, along her jawline and down the neck. He only moved when she slumped back against the bed, her eyes rolling grotesquely to the back of her head. While Danny jammed the buttons on the panicking machine she was wired up to, Anapa took a couple of steps forward, frowning slightly. He spoke for the first time only when the room was calm and quiet again.

“There’s a demon within her,” he murmured with the conviction of one who had total faith in his own beliefs. Although on this occasion, he wasn’t entirely wrong.

He stepped up to the edge of the bed, his frown deepening slightly, and held his hand out about half a foot above her face. This was unfamiliar in an unsettling way.

“She is not dead.” He said, retracting his hand. “Well,” he corrected himself almost immediately, “she is dead, but it is not a true death. Her soul has not departed for the Realm of the Dead. It lingers…” he shrugged “…elsewhere.”

The Realm Between Realms, perhaps? Or here? He watched the body intently for a moment, half hoping to see the greyscaled spirit rising from the false corpse.

There was something else too, though – a nagging doubt. Another of Anapa’s magics, one which simply came to him without conscious activation like the death sensing, was twisting in his gut.

“Ms Doe,” he said, this time more to himself, repeating the name Danny had used. Jane Doe was a term used in the morgue to describe unidentified female corpses, so he was familiar with Danny’s usage, but… “She is just Doe,” he muttered, a touch of surprise colouring his voice for the first time. “She has no name.”